Maybe you have time to read about the fact that it’s not just one guy. Nor the essence of the concern a new one. Your comment about The Guardian is interesting, too. Perhaps you would prefer Fox News rather than the frequent winner of “Best National Newspaper” and other major awards, which in any case was simply reporting on Binney’s talk at a conference held by the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
My point being that even if some of the specifics of the claims might not be fully accurate at this point in time, a sufficient number of whistleblowers have talked about the propensity of the NSA over a long period of time to engage in this kind of overreach that considering it to be at least plausible in its general outlines seems more realistic than a contemptuous dismissal.
Well your link makes it seem like it in fact is just one guy, there’s only one guy who could know who says this, and he cannot substantiate what he says. Just a second article about the same guy doesn’t change it. That’s like saying Uri Geller can really bend spoons because articles are written about it in two separate newspapers.
The Guardian is fine for most journalism, but it’s consistently shown on issues relating to international affairs, Israel, and the United States it’s no better than Fox News and often times even worse. It’s editorial foreign policy positions override good journalism in that sphere.
[ul]
[li]fellow NSA analyst J. Kirk Wiebe[/li][li]computer scientist (and former NSA cryptologist) Ed Loomis[/li][li]Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician who provided communications feeds to the NSA[/li][li]Diane Roark, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence which oversees the NSA[/li][li]Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the NSA and a colleague of Binney[/li][/ul]
That article is talking about different things happening at different times with those individuals. Maybe I missed it, but it doesn’t seem like it’s about the same story as linked to in the OP. The people you list:
We’re talking about different things. I’m really less concerned about the specific details of Binney’s current claims about telephone records than about the general syndrome of NSA overreach and lack of accountability, which has been corroborated by many including Snowden. What’s important here in my view is that the kind of phone record database Binney is talking about will be feasible in the not too distant future even if it’s not practical now, and this is concerning because this seems to be the culture of the NSA and the lack of legal oversight in which it operates. And this is far more important than bickering about the specifics of Binney’s claims as if they were some outlandish conspiracy theory, because even if it’s not true today, the NSA that we’ve been hearing about could make it true tomorrow. FYI, one company already announced a commercial 10-exabyte storage system – it wasn’t cheap, but that was two and a half years ago.
Absolutely that’s a concern, and I agree. But just because it’s an interesting point in and of itself, doesn’t change the fact that it did not address MH’s claim, as you said it did.
Largely true, because the bulk of the civil service does work that is independent of partisan politics. However, it isn’t wholly true. One party might favor more DMV funding, in which case lines get shorter. But taxes go up… So, in the end, we the people make the decision.
There most certainly is a time-lag in the civil services’ response to electoral change. But the Governor (in many states) nominates the head of the DMV (sometimes just as a reward for political support.) The DMV director will have some influence on overall departmental values.
Your “zero” is too strong; “very little” is, I think, better.
I definitely agree with the “that’s a good thing, by and large” assessment!
It’s fairly obvious to people who do the research that the NSA is trying to collect all content, not just “metadata” – only the former can explain the massive amount of storage they’re accumulating. As you note, they’ve been trying to hide this fact, precisely because they know that the public would not stand for it if it became generally known.
Fortunately, the various surveillance-scandal revelations are providing a catalyst for long-overdue moves toward universalencryption. Once the last remaining obstacle (steep learning curves) is overcome, the communications infrastructure simply will not permit any attempts at fishing-expedition bulk surveillance – each monitoring operation will require a significant investment in either computing power or bug-planting, so the government will have to pick and choose a very small number of targets (which will put them in even hotter water if they miss an actual threat because they wasted one of their limited slots on a petty crook or political opponent).
I would add that similar calculations are precisely why the claim that the NSA stores “only metadata” are transparent lies – given that each phone call generates a few dozen bytes of metadata (caller number, called number, start time, duration), the metadata for all phone calls in the world for a year would easily fit in a footlocker full of hard drives for a retail (not even bulk-discounted) budget in the low five figures.
You don’t even want to know. I can’t even imagine the amount of storage to attempt to record and store (for how long??) every call made in the US. I seem to recall that something like 3 billion calls were made in the US per day. So, say we are talking about 2 billion calls a day. No idea what the average length of a call would be, but IIRC it’s something like 96 KB/min. Pretty low, until you start looking at the scale we are talking here. So, 10k calls per gig, approximately, or 200 million gig per day in storage…200k terabytes (190 petabytes). A day. Presumably you’d want to store it longer than a day (I don’t know how you’d even process that level of data, but I guess if you have magical storage you could have some sort of magical sorting algorithm). We won’t get into the tags you’d need to ID the calls (the text of the calls, call ID and other metadata), since that’s mostly text and chump change compared to the rest.
All of that is possible, I suppose, given enough money and resources…but why in the name of the gods would you WANT to store 80% of the calls in the US? Most of which are going to be simple inane chatter? It would cost huge amounts of money and large resources in personnel just to view the sorted data where words like ‘bomb’ or ‘terrorist’ were used (which is presumably what they would be looking for), let alone to sort through and store all the vast majority of the horseshit.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
That’s 80% of all the fiber-optic calls in the world. Calls from the US would, presumably, be a much smaller percentage.
[/QUOTE]
Even more ridiculous. I can’t believe that people find even the first claim in the OP plausible.
That’s an average of twenty calls per person (each one counts twice, having a caller and a callee) per day. For a more realistic guesstimate, divide by five or thereabouts.
Considering that a 2 terabyte drive will run $100 at Best Buy, this isn’t as big as it seems.
Quite eminently possible. As noted in one of my previous links, the analysis done Brewster Kahle (who set up the Internet Archive and thus has a pretty good track record for knowing what such an operation entails) is that it’s trivially easy for government-scale resources.
I’m not an expert in psychological dysfunction. Try asking someone who deals with those sad souls who have houses full of decades-old newpapers and whatnot.
What I could never believe is that anyone ever fell for the “it’s just metadata” lie, given the huge discrepancy between the trivial amounts of storage required for “just metadata” and the actual demands of the agency.
Er… how do you divide 2 billion by 10k (10000) and get 200 million? Are you using the “long billion” (and thereby assuming that each person in the US makes an average of twenty thousand phone calls per day)?
Compare what I said to what you’ve said, that does not refute or address what I said at all. In the past I used to quote myself and highlight my specific wording, but I’ve decided not to help people do what should be an easy exercise–reading posts as they were written. FWIW I was aware of exactly this study when I posted, which is why I chose the words I did.
I don’t think cost is even the limiter here. Microsoft could probably afford the infrastructure and it’s just a company. But that being said, the U.S. government could afford to replicate the infrastructure involved in creating Google, does that mean they’d have a working system as effective as Google’s search engine? Highly unlikely. In fact Microsoft basically did replicate Google as it had the resources, and its result has always been questionable in comparison (I’m aware in recent years some “tests” have shown Bing is truly Google’s peer, but people also aren’t really using it much.)
I mean if I give Madagascar the amount of money in cost-adjusted dollars to replicate the Apollo program, there is 0.0% chance that in 8 years time they land someone on the moon. Money isn’t the limiter for all technology, sometimes it’s actually building out a workable system, and we’ve struggled with relatively simple data-integration and enrollment systems (PPACA Website) when managed by the government.
That’s before we get into how the government could meaningfully utilize this store of phone calls relative to the effort involved in creating/maintaining the system.